NEW DELHI: What's common between Marissa Mayer and Sheryl Sandberg, and Shikha Sharma and KalpanaMorparia? They're just four of the products of two CEO factories: one American, the other Indian. Mayer and Sandberg are Google products who have gone on to leadership positions at Yahoo! and Facebook; and Sharma and Morparia are today at the helm of Axis Bank and JPMorgan India after honing their leadership skills at ICICI Bank.

While Mayer left Google this week to join Yahoo! as CEO, Sandberg, COO of Facebook since 2008, was vice-president of global online sales and operations when she left the internet product & services giant after a six-year stint.

Other chiefs that Google has spawned include Tim Armstrong, chairman & CEO of AOL since 2009, who was president of Google's American operations; and Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, who was co-founder of FeedBurner, a web feed management provider that Google acquired in 2007.

Google isn't the first CEO factory in the West; Unilever and General Electric have also been responsible for nurturing talent that went on to lead corporations. Back home, Hindustan Unilever, Citibank and ICICI are well known for their senior executives who graduated to chief executives.

PSUs potential talent factories too

Headhunter K Sudarshan, managing partner-India & regional VP-Asia, EMA Partners International, says CEO factories keep changing with the times. So, which are the current ones he would be looking at as fertile CEO poaching ground? Wipro, Pepsi, Coca-Cola and Airtel, lets on Sudarshan. Sonal Agrawal, CEO of search firm Accord India, too, has Wipro and Pepsi on her list. Notable honchos from Wipro who have gone on to head corporations include Vikram Gulati, CEO & MD of Happiest Minds, a start-up founded by Ashok Soota, an ex-Wipro hand himself. Yum Restaurants has former PepsiCo executive Muktesh Pant as CEO, and Harit Nagpal, another ex-Pepsi manager, is MD & CEO of Tata Sky.

"The most under-rated CEO factories in India are TCS and Wipro," says Vikram Chhachhi, executive vice-president, at DHR International, a Chicago-based search firm. He also has HDFC on his list.

So what makes a company a CEO factory? Says Nina Chatrath, managing principal at Korn/Ferry in India: "One category of such factories is where the organisations have superior systems and processes; the other is where people have got structured and varied work experiences that have helped develop them into holistic leaders."

If Google is turning out CEOs today, it is because the freedom to work on projects and a focus on product innovation spurred the creation of new leaders, says Accord's Agrawal.

Leadership experts also count PSUs as potential talent factories as private companies looking for specialists hunt on such state-owned turf. "Earlier this would happen at the end of their tenured service where they came in as consultants; now we are witnessing people taking decision to switch mid-career," Korn/Ferry's Chatrath says.